Musical instruments, including drums, are valuable professional, recreational, and educational devices. However, drums that produce a quality sound are often quite expensive to make or buy. A typical drum may include a drum head, which may include a membrane stretched tightly across an opening of a drum shell. Impact of this tightly stretched membrane, for example by a drumstick or by hand, creates percussive sound. The drum head may also include a top hoop which may retain the membrane in a desired position over the drum shell opening. However, the top hoop typically must be anchored to the drum to secure it in place.
It is often desirable to avoid putting many holes or indentations in the drum shell in order to attach the drum head to the drum shell. Excessive holes or indentations may diminish the quality of the musical tone of the drum. While it is true that some holes or indentations may be formed in a shell without diminishing the quality of the tone, such holes or indentations typically must be sized, shaped, and located very carefully, which can be painstaking and/or expensive. Thus, it is often desirable to simply avoid use of such holes or indentations to attach the drum head to the drum shell.
One method of such attachment involves use of a bottom hoop positioned over the end of the drum shell that is opposite the top hoop. Thus, the top hoop and bottom hoop may straddle the drum shell, may use the drum shell as a foundation for counter balancing forces, and as a result may be attached with a considerable amount of force between them. For example, a bolt or spring may be attached to a top hoop location and a bottom hoop location, and tightened down appropriately, with the forces compressing the drum shell in a longitudinal direction instead of causing holes or indentations in the drum shell.
A plurality of such bolts or springs may be used in various locations around the top hoop and bottom hoop to enhance attachment and distribute the longitudinal compressive forces. Furthermore, tightening or loosening of the bolts or springs may be used to facilitate tuning of the drum head membrane, with tightening or loosening resulting in a corresponding increase or decrease in pitch of the membrane in the area near the respective bolt or spring. Thus, such an arrangement is often desirable to produce a tunable drum head that is part of a drum that produces a rich or high quality sound. However, drum shells are often formed of expensive materials and/or are manufactured with high precision to create a desired tone. Such drum shells are often expensive and, in some cases, may result in the drum being prohibitively expensive, especially for recreational or educational users.
Use of a bucket, such as a five-gallon bucket that one might find at a home improvement store that is used to store a liquid or other materials, has been offered as a way to form a drum shell thus decreasing the cost of a drum. In these cases, the top hoop and bottom hoop may be attached to one another so as to straddle a lip or fin of the bucket. However, doing so generally requires the top and/or bottom hoops to pull all support from the fin. Bucket fins generally are not strong enough or resilient enough to handle the associated forces, and will quickly roll, bend, and/or deform, leading to failure of the fin and thus failure of the bucket as an effective drum shell.
Thus there is a need in the art for overcoming the issues of existing systems.